The Secret Scripture

by Sebastian Barry

  ‘You should heed your bishops so. And not give succour to the damned.’

  ‘You let me have my own thoughts on that,’ said Fr Gaunt, with a sort of schoolmasterish arrogance. ‘What are you going to do with the body? Don’t you want to take it with you?’

  ‘What do you want to do with it?’ said the soldier, now with a sudden weariness, the fall in energy that comes after great effort. They had charged into an unknown place with God knew what danger, and now it seemed the thought of lugging John’s brother Willie was a feather too far. Or a hammer.

  ‘I’ll have the doctor fetched and pronounce him dead and find out who owns him, and then perhaps we can bury him somewhere in the yard, if you have no objection.’

  ‘You will be burying a devil if you do. Better throw him in a hole outside the walls, like a criminal, or a bastard child.’

  Fr Gaunt said nothing to that. The soldier went out. He never looked at me once. When his boots stopped sounding on the gravel path outside, the queerest coldest silence dreeped into the temple. My father stood silent, and the priest, and I sat silently on the cold damp floor, and John’s brother Willie was most silent of all.

  ‘I am extremely angry,’ said Fr Gaunt then, in his best Sunday mass voice, ‘to have been dragged into this. Extremely angry, Mr Clear.’

  My father looked nonplussed. What else was he to do? My father’s unmoored face scared me just as much as Willie’s stiffening corpse.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said my father. ‘I’m sorry if I acted wrongly in getting Roseanne to fetch you.’

  ‘You did wrong to do that, you did wrong, yes. I am deeply aggrieved. You may remember it was I who put you in this post. It was I, and great powers of persuasion were needed, let 53

  me tell you. I feel very poorly thanked, very poorly.’

  With that, the priest went out into the dark and the rain, leaving my father and myself with the dead boy, till the doctor could arrive.

  ‘I suppose I put his life in danger. I suppose he was frightened. But I did not intend it. By heavens, I thought priests liked to be in on everything. Indeed and I did.’

  My poor father sounded frightened too, but now because of a new and different cause.

  How delicately, slowly, fate undid him, I suppose.

  There are things that move at a human pace before our eyes, but other things move in arcs so great they are as good as invisible. The baby sees a star winking in the dark night window, and puts out his hand to hold it. So my father struggled to grasp things that were in truth far beyond his reach, and indeed when they showed their lights were already old and done.

  I think it was that my father embarrassed history.

  He was neither willing nor unwilling to bury that boy Willie, and called a priest to help him in his decision. It was as if as a Presbyterian he had meddled in sacred murders, or murders so beyond gentleness and love that to be even in propinquity to them was ruinous, murderous even.

  Perhaps in later years I heard versions of that night that didn’t fit my own memory of it, but all the same, there was always one grand constant, that I had stopped in my path to fetch Fr Gaunt and told my tale to the Free State soldiers, either at my father’s bidding or by my own instincts. The fact that I never saw the soldiers, never spoke to them, never even thought of doing so – for would that not have put my father possibly in further danger? – is in the informal history of Sligo 54

  neither here nor there. For history as far as I can see is not the arrangement of what happens, in sequence and in truth, but a fabulous arrangement of surmises and guesses held up as a banner against the assault of withering truth.

  History needs to be mightily inventive about human life because bare life is an accusation against man’s dominion of the earth.

  My own story, anyone’s own story, is always told against me, even what I myself am writing here, because I have no heroic history to offer. There is no difficulty not of my own making. The heart and the soul, so beloved of God, are both filthied up by residence here, how can we avoid it? These seem not my thoughts at all, but maybe are borrowed out of old readings of Sir Thomas Browne. But they feel as if they are mine. They sound in my head like my own belling thoughts. It is strange. I suppose therefore God is the connoisseur of filthied hearts and souls, and can see the old, first pattern in them, and cherish them for that.

  He had better be in my case, or I may dwell with the devil shortly.

  Our house was clean, but did not look so clean the day that Fr Gaunt came to visit us. It was Sunday morning about ten, so I may assume Fr Gaunt was between masses and had hurried from his church along the river to knock on our door. As my mother had an old mirror balanced on a yellow brick in the window of the sitting room, we could always see without showing ourselves who was at the door, and the sight of the priest sent us scurrying about. A fourteen-year-old girl is always vividly aware of her appearance, or thinks she must be, or whatever it is, but speaking of mirrors I was at that time a slave to the one in my mother’s bedroom, not because I 55

  thought I looked well, but because I did not know how I looked, and laboured many a minute to adjust myself into a picture I could trust, or was content with, and never could achieve it. The gold of my hair looked like some wet grass gone wild to me, and for the life of me I did not know the soul of the person that peered back at me in my mother’s mossy little mirror. Because the edges of the mirror were strangely decayed, she had actually bought some unusual enamel paint in the chemist as may be, and decorated the edges of the mirror with tiny black stems and leaves, that lent everything that appeared in that less-than-poetical mirror a funereal look, which perhaps had suited my father’s profession, at least up to now. So my first action was to dash up our few little stairs to the mirror and make an assault on my fourteen-year-old sense of horror.

  When I got back down to the living room my father was standing in the middle of it, looking about him like a baulking pony, his eyes lighting first on the motorcycle, then on the piano, then on the spaces in between, his hand dashing now to a cushion on the ‘best’ chair. When I glanced out into the tiny hall, my mother was merely lodged there, stuck there, not moving a muscle, like an actor waiting to go out on a stage, gearing up her courage. Then she lifted the latch.

  As Fr Gaunt edged into our room, the first thing I noticed was how glistening he seemed, his face shaved so closely you could write on it with a pen. He looked so safe, the safest thing in Ireland in an unsafe time. Every month of that year was the worst month, my father had said, as every person killed echoed in him. But the priest looked sacrosanct, pristine, separate, as if separate from the history of Ireland itself. Not that I thought this at the time, God knows what I thought, I don’t know, only that this cleanliness made me fearful.

  I had never seen my father quite so fussed. He could only speak in rushes and gaps.

  56

  ‘Ah, but, yes, sit down there, Father, do, now,’ he said, nearly advancing on the unsmiling priest, as if to knock him back into the chair. But Fr Gaunt sat down steady as a dancer. I knew my mother was in the hallway, in that little gap of privacy and silence. I stood at my father’s right side like a watchman, like a sentry against the storm of an attack. My head was filled with some unknown darkness, I couldn’t think, I couldn’t continue that long conversation we make in our heads, as if an angel were writing there unbeknownst.

  ‘Hmm,’ said my father. ‘We’ll make tea, how about that?’ he said. ‘Yes, we will. Cissy, Cissy, will you heat the kettle, dear, do.’

  ‘I drink so much tea,’ said the priest, ‘it’s a wonder my skin doesn’t turn brown.’

  My father laughed.

  ‘I’m sure you do, out of a sense of duty. But no need in my house. No need. I, that owe everything in the world to you, everything in the world. Not that, not that –’

  And here my father floundered, and blushed, and I blushed too I dare say, for reasons I could not understand. The priest cleared his throat, and smiled.

 
; ‘I will take a cup of tea, of course I will.’

  ‘Ah, well, that’s good, that’s good,’ and already we could hear my mother scraping about in the pantry down the corridor.

  ‘It is so cold today,’ said the priest, rubbing his hands suddenly, ‘that I am very relieved to be near a fire, now, I am. It is so frosty along the river. Do you think’, he said, drawing out a silver case, ‘I might smoke?’

  ‘Oh, fire away,’ said my father.

  The priest now drew his box of Swan matches from his soutane, and a funny oblong-shaped cigarette from the case, struck the match with a beautiful precision and neatness, and drew in the flame with his breath through the crisp tube. Then he exhaled and gave a little cough.

  ‘The – the,’ said the priest, ‘the position in the graveyard as 57

  you can well imagine is not – tenable. Em?’

  He gave another elegant pull on the cigarette, adding: ‘I am afraid to say, Joe. I dislike this fact as I am sure you dislike it. But I am sure you will appreciate the – the great cloud of dust that has descended on my head, between the bishop, who believes all the renegades must be excommunicated, as was decided at the recent synod, and the mayor, who as you may be aware is very much against the treaty as it stands, and as the most influential man in Sligo carries great – influence. As you can imagine, Joe.’

  ‘Oh,’ said my father.

  ‘Yes.’

  Now the priest went a third time at the cigarette and found he already had quite an ash to deal with and in that silent dumbshow of smokers looked about for an ashtray, an item that did not exist in our house, even for visitors. My father astonished me by putting out his hand to the priest, admittedly a hard hand coarsened by digging, and Fr Gaunt astonished me by immediately flicking the ash into the offered hand, which perhaps flinched tinily for a moment when the heat hit it. My father, left with the ash, looked about almost foolishly, as if there might have been an ashtray put in the room after all, without his knowledge, and then, with horrible solemnity, pocketed it.

  ‘Hmm,’ said my father. ‘Yes, I can imagine there is a difficulty to reconcile those two poles.’

  He spoke the words so gently.

  ‘I have of course looked about, especially in the town hall, for an alternative occupation, and if at first this seemed an impossible – em, possibility – then, when I was just about to give up, the mayor’s secretary, Mr Dolan, told me there was a job on offer, in fact, they had been trying to fill it some time past, with some urgency, due to the veritable plague of rats that has been bedevilling the warehouses on the riverside. Finisglen 58

  as you know is a very salubrious district, the doctor himself lives there, and unfortunately the docks abut it, as of course you know, as everyone knows.’

  Now I could write a little book on the nature of human silences, their uses and occasions, but the silence that my father offered to this speech was very dreadful. It was a silence like a hole with a sucking wind in it. He blushed further, which brought his face to crimson, like the victim of an attack. At this moment my mother entered with the tea, looking like a servant among kings, you would think, afraid perhaps to look at my father, so keeping her eyes on the little tray with its painted scene of some French field of poppies. I had often gazed at that tray where it lived on the top of the dresser in the pantry, and imagined I could see a wind blowing along the flowers, and wondered what it was like in that world of heat and dark language.

  ‘So,’ said the priest, ‘I am happy to offer you, in the name of the mayor Mr Salmon, em, the eh – post. Job.’

  ‘Of?’ said my father.

  ‘Of,’ said the priest.

  ‘What?’ said my mother, probably against her better intentions, the word just popping into the room.

  ‘Rat-catcher,’ said the priest.

  It fell to me, I know not why, to bring the priest to the door. On the narrow pavement, with the chill gathering about him, creeping no doubt up his soutane along his bare legs, the little priest said:

  ‘Please, tell your father, Roseanne, that all the accoutrements of the trade are at the town hall. Traps, et cetera, I suppose. That’s where he’ll find them.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  59

  Then he started off down the street, stopped a moment. I don’t know why I stayed there watching him. He took off one of his black shoes, leaning a hand on the brick wall of our neighbour’s house, then balanced on one foot, feeling the underside of his sock for whatever hindered his walk, a pebble or piece of grit. Then he unhitched the sock from its gaiter, and removed it in a smooth sweep, revealing a long white foot with the toenails rather yellow like old teeth, folding back on his toes, as if they had never been cut. Then he spotted me with my eyes still on him, and laughed, and having routed out the offending stone, put back his sock and his shoe, and stood there solidly on the pavement.

  ‘Such a relief,’ he said pleasantly. ‘Good day. And,’ he said,

  ‘now I think of it, there is also a dog. A dog attached to the job. For ratting.’

  When I went back into the sitting room my father had not moved. The motorbike had not moved. The piano had not moved. My father looked like he would never move again. My mother I heard scratching about in the pantry, very like a rat. Or a little dog looking for a rat.

  ‘Do you know anything about that job, Dadda?’ I said.

  ‘Do I – oh, I suppose.’

  ‘You won’t find it so hard.’

  ‘No, no, because I have often had to deal with such things at the cemetery. The rats do love the soft soil on the graves, and the gravestones make such good roofs for them. Yes, I have had to deal with them. I will have to study the matter. Perhaps there will be a manual in the library.’

  ‘A rat-catcher’s manual?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, don’t you think, Roseanne?’

  ‘I am sure, Dadda.’

  ‘Oh, yes.

  60

  chapter six

  Yes, how well I remember the day my father was let go from the cemetery, a living man exiled from the dead.

  That was a little murder also.

  My father loved the world and his fellow humans in it, without much reservation on his part, considering as a good Presbyterian must that all souls are equally assailed, and hearing in the rough laughter of the cornerboy a kind of essential explanation of life, and thereby a redemption of it, in fact believing that since God had created everything, so everything by him must be approved, and also that the devil’s own tragedy is he is author of nothing and architect of empty spaces. My father, by cause of all this, based his good opinion of himself on his work, that, as a person of unusual religion, he had yet been given a post to bury the Catholic people of Sligo as time claimed them one by one.

  ‘Such pride, such pride!’ he used to say, as together we locked the iron gates at evening, preparatory to going home, and his eyes fell in back through the bars to the darkening rows, the disappearing headstones that were his care. I suppose he was talking to himself, or to the graves, and probably not to me, and he might not have thought for a moment that I would have understood him. Perhaps I did not, but I think I understand him now. The truth was, my father loved his country, he loved whatever in his mind he thought Ireland to be. Maybe if he had been born a Jamaican, he might have loved Jamaica just as much. But he was not. His ancestors had held the little sinecures available to their kind in Irish towns, inspectors of buildings and the like, and his father had even gained the eminence of a preacher. He 61

  was born in a small minister’s house in Collooney, his infant heart loved Collooney, his growing heart expanding in its love to the island entire. Because his father was one of those radical thinkers, who had written pamphlets or at least preached sermons – because no pamphlets survive, but I seem to remember my father mentioning one or two – on the history of Protestantism in Ireland, my father held opinions not always favourable to himself. That is to say, he thought of the Protestant religion as an instrument as s
oft as a feather transformed into a hammer by the old dispensation, and used to batter the heads of those that laboured to live in Ireland, the most of them Catholics by nature. His own father loved Presbyterianism, and he did himself, but he was mortally sorry, no, he was mortally angry at the uses it had been put to, along with the religions of the Anglicans, Baptists et cetera, in Ireland. How do I know? Because every night of my childhood, every night, the last thing he did in the house was come into my narrow bed, shoving me over with his wide hips, so that I lay half on him, my head on his whiskery face, and talked and talked and talked, while my mother went to sleep in the other room. When he heard her small snores he would leave me and join her, but in that half hour, in the darkness, as he allowed her to settle into sleep on her own, the moon first sitting on the back wall, and then floating darkly and brightly as is the manners of the moon, into the sky of unattainable stars (as I well knew), he recited to me all the intimations, suspicions and histories of his heart, not perhaps even bothering himself with the thought that I might not understand, but offering it all as a music quite as desirable to him and therefore to me as the works of Balfe and Sullivan, two of the greatest Irishmen that had ever lived, in his opinion.

  And working in the graveyard, under the patronage as it were of Fr Gaunt, was in some manner to him his life perfected, made good. In some manner, made as a prayer back to his 62

  own father. It was the way he had learned to live, in Ireland, the accidental place he loved.

  And to lose the job was to lose in some extraordinary fashion himself.

  Now it was more difficult to be with him. It was hard for him to bring me ratting, it being such a dirty, tricky and perilous occupation.

  Being a thorough man, he soon found the little book that would help him, called A Perfect Account of Rat-Catching, by a pseudonymous author, Rattus Rattus. This booklet recounted the adventures of a rat-catcher in the factories of Manchester, a city of heaped-up factories with infinite places for rats to live and hide. It told my father how to go about his work, itemising everything, even the sort of attention that was needed to be paid to the feet of ferrets, who it seemed were very vulnerable to foot-rot in damp cages. But my father never attained the dignity of owning ferrets. The corporation of Sligo was less ambitious. He was given a Jack Russell dog called Bob. So began the strangest era of my childhood. I suppose also I was slowly less child than girl, less girl than woman. For the years of my father’s ratting, a solemn mood of my own descended on me. Things that had delighted and pleased me as a child delighted and pleased no longer. It was as if something had been taken from the pictures and sounds of the world, or as if the greatest possession of a child is easy joy. So that I felt I was in a condition of waiting, waiting for something unknown to replace the grace of being young. Of course I was young, very young, but, as I remember it, no one is ever quite so old as a fifteen-year-old girl.